


Terra Verde

by ivanolix



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Gen Fic, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-11
Updated: 2009-09-11
Packaged: 2017-10-22 03:29:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivanolix/pseuds/ivanolix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something told them that they had been to Earth before, but weren't remembering the right memories for it to make sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terra Verde

**Author's Note:**

> This is more a backstory fic than anything else, something that gripped me about Kara's fierce remembrance of Earth in Season 4.0, and then the new canon about the Final Five in Revelations, all leading into the Kara canon of Season 4.5.

_I saw Earth._

No need to squint, as the sun forced only a slight tendril through the thick cold clouds above.

 _The shape of it, the smell of it._

Cold sending every hair on edge, every muscle tightening. A sharp salt smell all that got past the bite of the cold.

 _The feel of it on my skin, in my pores._

Black sand squelching beneath heavy boots. Air thick with vapor and the poison of a thousand bombs, weight added to the pressure making it difficult to breathe.

 _And I swear to you, it was like I'd been there before. Like I never left._

But this was not the Earth Kara had remembered.

ooo  
 _  
“All worlds start like this,” Kara said, leaning down to swipe her fingers through the tips of the gold-green grass. “Just like everything, life seems beautiful when you’re young.”_

 _She glanced up a the blue sky, dotted with clouds, the sun peppering through and leaving dappled shadows on the meadow.  
_  
ooo

The guitar neck scraped roughly against Sam’s hand, and in an alien moment he remembered having hands less calloused, fingers sensitive to how each fraction of an inch could change the music.  
 _  
“Let us not talk falsely now, because the hour is getting late.”  
_  
He felt it vibrate in him, then glanced up. No one was there. His heart beat, and even as he dropped the guitar neck and turned to retreat—  
 _  
“I wrote you a song,” he said, smiling to himself even as he adjusted the strings._

 _“You wrote me. A song.” Her voice saturated the surrounding air with humor._

 _“It’s not a love song,” he said, as his fingers found the first chord. But I think I love you, he said in his head. And then the notes were moving through him again. “There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief.”_

 _It was not a love song._

Sam was breathing in air that was from Earth, as he saw through his own eyes again, saw ruins. He was running to find Galen and Tory to see what they knew now. But this Earth here was not the Earth he remembered.

ooo  
 _  
He sat and let the wind sing in his ears for a moment, let the sun warm patterns across his arms. But then he felt it again. Opening his eyes, he watched for the grass to bend beneath her feet as she walked over to him. She shouldn’t be able to do it, his warning of the apocalypse._

 _“Playing hooky?” she asked._

 _He couldn’t tell if the grass really did move. And if it did, could she not just manipulate how he saw that too?_

 _“No,” he said. “I was thinking about the lab.”_

 _And her. He shouldn’t have to admit that, if she was this deep into his head that he saw her like this._

ooo

Flames burned high around Kara’s body as she watched it from inside another. She didn’t remember that either. What happened to the Earth she remembered? What happened to the bright home that was just on the tip of her memory, but with only impressions that she could grasp?

And Sam wasn’t back on the ship. He walked across the planet in the dark, until he saw the light of the fire and knew it was Kara. He didn’t know what it meant, and he couldn’t ask. She had remembered Earth first, but what about him? He couldn’t remember why he would live with Galen and Tory and Saul and Ellen. What was wrong with him?

ooo  
 _  
Kara Thrace stood, wind blowing through her hair that didn’t exist in the strictest form of reality, and she let the sun shine on her as if the warmth she felt was the interaction of atoms. It was tiresome to divide reality like that._

 _Behind her was her project, the one she had to guard and remind. He was free, coming here to brainstorm instead of at the lab where she kept trying to look for him. But she understood as she was with him up here._

 _“Why do I constantly think of the apocalypse?” he asked, and she turned to him._

 _“What do you mean?” she answered._

 _“The song,” Samuel Anders said, sitting cross-legged on the grass of the sunlit meadow. “It’s about change, foreboding.” He looked more closely at her, tossing a hand. “And of course, there’s you.”_

 _“Your subconscious,” she answered, in a playful tone that was only acknowledging what he imagined. His belief that she was a delusion was fascinatingly delightful, though on occasion frustrating. She couldn’t remember her last role in the cycle of time being quite like this._

 _“Apparently I’m always thinking about the doom of the world,” Sam concluded, gathering a dandelion puff into his hand and letting the wind waft it gently away._

 _Kara didn’t look at him long. She turned and looked down from the hill where the meadow lay. Below huddled millions of Cylons, bustling around their city that gleamed and sparkled on the surface._

 _“They look around, and it’s as if they don’t remember Kobol,” Sam said again. He had risen, come to stand near, looked down on the city with her. “They don’t think this world could end too.”_

 _She looked to him. “That’s not bad, Sam,” she said. “You think something—it’s almost as if it’s real.”_

 _For a moment they stood side by side above the city that Kara had foreseen would be in blistered ashes like the rest of Earth._

 _“Really?” Sam asked curiously, turning his head suddenly to her._

 _She smiled her grinning smile at him. “Really. Trust me, who else would know?”_

 _He didn’t quite roll his eyes, because after all, to him she was only his delusion and he couldn’t blame it if his own mind pretended to be an angel from God sent to protect him and warn against apocalypse. No, he couldn’t blame her at all._

 _“So,” he said, looking back at her more closely. She realized he was still thinking about that little thing she had said. But she didn’t know what could possibly hold his thought. “So,” he continued, “if I just forgot that I’m an insane machine and you’re a figment of my imagination, and if you forgot that you’re older than time and some kind of angel that’s also a figment of my imagination, you’re saying if that happened—”_

 _He paused, and she didn’t quite know where he was going. She just stood, waiting for his words._

 _“If that happened,” he said, looking her fully in the eye, “what we did after that would be real. We might as well be who we thought we were, because our minds might as well create reality. If that could happen.”_

 _She paused and smiled. Always having chosen the challenge instead of the easy route, she had to listen closely to his words. How solid, Earth-bound—but she didn’t laugh, because that didn’t mean they were untrue._

 _“I’ve never tried to forget,” she answered, the hint of a knowing smirk playing on her lips._

 _He nodded, satisfied with it as an answer. “Why not do it?” he then added._

 _She shifted back slightly, eyeing him closely. “What?”_

 _“Try forgetting you’re an imaginary angel,” he said, a playful grin around his mouth again. “And see what happens.”_

 _She scrunched her face at him, amused. “I’m not only in your head, Sam. I have a mission; you’re my role in this cycle. All this will happen before, and will happen again, and I’m there for it all.”_

 _“Same role every time?” Sam asked, curious but with a sharp to-the-point air. “So you just pretend that you don’t know what I’ll say?”_

 _She shook her head, chortling in the back of her throat. “Never the same, Sam. That’s not the point. It’s not an exact repeat, in details.”_

 _“So why not try something new,” Sam insisted, his face all alight with the idea. “What happens when you forget? If you don’t remember who you are, are you truly that?”_

 _“You toy with philosophy like cats with mice,” she said with a grin, bringing up a finger to flick the end of his nose._

 _“And you avoid all my questions,” he answered pointedly, one eyebrow raised. “Come on, do it.”_

 _“The next cycle?” she asked, pretending to go along by asking for clarification. At least, it was supposed to be pretending._

 _“I know, I probably won’t be there,” Sam said. But he smiled at her again, and this time it was softer, easier. There was an emotion there she couldn’t quite name. “I’m just curious, I want to know that someone finds out the answer.”_

 _She paused and watched his face for a second. Then, sliding her arm around his elbow in the usual routine, they started walking down the hill. “We will see if someone does,” she said._

 _And she didn’t need to look at his face to know that he was smiling again._

 _He hadn’t had to say the actual words; she recognized a challenge when she heard it. As soon as this task was done, even when he was gone and the next cycle began—she had a feeling she’d accept it._

 _Someone did find out the answer._   
  



End file.
